Vatican cardinal’s address on priestly celibacy

January 28, 2011

Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, prefect of the Congregation for Clergy since October, has delivered a magisterial address on the teachings of the popes since Pope Pius XI on priestly celibacy. The address was delivered on January 24 at a colloquium in Ars.

“We must [not] allow ourselves to be conditioned or intimidated by a world without God, which does not understand celibacy and that would like to remove it,” the cardinal concludes. “On the contrary, we must recuperate the reasoned understanding that our celibacy offers as a challenge to the world, placing its secularism and agnosticism in profound crisis and crying out, through the centuries, that God is present and active.”

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